Nuclear trigger

The Review Conference of the Non-Proliferation Treaty opens in New York Monday. This regular five-year assessment of how well the world is doing in preventing nuclear destruction will be conducted amid the old familiar atmosphere of urgency and a new one of hope.

The hope is modest, more of a hint than the real thing. The ratification last week of START II by the Russian Duma is an encouraging sign that the Putin government is indeed committed to reducing the number of warheads. The recent reaching out by North Korea to South suggests that the nation long seen as most likely to launch an unprovoked nuclear strike is crumbling without its Soviet sponsor, unable to feed itself, much less bring Asia to its knees.

The urgency is real. Since the last review of this 30-year-old, 187-nation treaty, India and Pakistan have joined the nuclear club, the nuclear capabilities of nations in the Middle East are an increasing source of worry. But increased nuclear tension is not just the Third World’s doing — the United States has done a considerable amount of ratcheting. The Senate’s rejection of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) last fall was shockingly partisan, the stumbling blocks Republicans said prevented ratification remain untouched. Congress’ love affair with an anti-ballistic missile defense continues, despite every indication that the best tens of billions of dollars can do for “shooting a bullet with a bullet” technology is to advance it from unworkable to unreliable and to invalidate the 28-year-old ABM treaty.

Most troubling of all, 10 years after the end of the Cold War, is the fact that the United States and Russia have nearly 5,000 nuclear weapons on high alert, ready to be launched at a moment’s notice at an enemy that no longer exists in a war of nerves that has been over for a decade. The number and degree of false alarms are impossible to prove; there is, however, solid evidence that they have been many and serious.

Dr. Peter Wilk of Sebago is president of the international organization Physicians for Social Responsibility, one of several groups urging the United States and Russia to come off red alert, to decouple warheads from delivery systems sufficiently so that the fate of millions of people does not rely upon a hair trigger and a snap decision.

“The members of Congress who oppose the CTBT and support the ballistic-missile defense system do so with good intentions of assuring national security,” Dr. Wilk says. “With the encouraging events in Russia, the dramatic steps taken by President Putin, the United States now must decide whether it will answer with more provocative steps or take the most important step — joining with Russia to come off high alert.”

Nuclear de-alerting is an executive decision. President George Bush did it with 500 American weapons in 1991 to ease tensions during the breakup of the Soviet Union and President Mikhail Gorbachev reciprocated a few days later. President Clinton could do the same during the NPT conference. There are clear indications it could be done in concert with President Putin, especially if such a gesture had the full support of Congress.

Dr. Wilk notes that Congress could find the nonpartisan will to offer that support if it heeds what the public is saying. “Twenty-three Maine towns have passed anti-nuclear resolutions, the list is growing here and in other states. These are small but significant statements: the issues of reducing and eventually eliminating nuclear weapons, of preventing their spread throughout the world, are complex; the chances of resolving these issues are greater if we step back from the brink.”